October 23-26, 2005

The Grand Hotel, Brighton, United Kingdom

The biennial ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles is the
world's premier forum for researchers, developers, programmers, vendors
and teachers of operating system technology. Academic and industrial
participants present research and experience papers that cover the full
range of theory and practice.

The symposium will be held at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, a
regency period seaside town with easy access from London.

An
Invitation from the Program Chair

Dear Colleague,

SOSP ‘05 continues the conference's tradition of presenting the best
innovative work in the systems software area, taking a broad view of
what the area encompasses. We believe that this year's conference
contains some of the most original, intriguing, and important work in
the field today — work that the entire community, including systems
practitioners as well as researchers, will find both stimulating and
useful.

SOSP ‘05 drew a highly competitive selection from a large collection
of diverse, original work submitted by authors internationally. The
selection criteria was tough: out of a record-setting 155 submissions,
only 20 were accepted, and even these were subjected to an intensive
feedback and shepherding process before the final acceptance. Every one
of them is an exceptional paper and, jointly, they form a program of
creative, well-developed work. These are papers that open new and
innovative areas, offer unexpected insights, and will set the stage for
years of future work.

The program presents important results in a wide range of areas,
including distributed storage systems that slash energy costs while
improving performance, virus detection and inhibition mechanisms that
can stop an infection in its tracks within hundreds of milliseconds, new
insights into robust software construction, ideas for using contextual
information in everything from file search to system repair after a
viral attack, and much more.

Peer to peer computing has been the rage for much of the past
decade. We’ll see some of the best recent work, but will also have a
panel session to debate the actual impact and future of this line of
research. Is peer-to-peer computing about to revolutionize distributed
computing, or is the well running dry? At SOSP ’05, we’ll learn the
bottom line.

SOSP ‘05 also offers more opportunities to learn about the state of
the art in systems software through short Work-in-Progress presentations
and a Poster Session interleaved with the conference as a whole, so that
each coffee break will bring a chance to meet some of the young
researchers in the field and to learn about their work while it is still
in its formative stages.

In summary, I believe this year's SOSP features an outstanding
program giving insightful and useful results taken from the best of
current systems software research and practice.